RVTKD news + ideas

My Aikido teacher, Yoshioka Sadao Shihan, used to describe the path that one takes in the martial arts to walking on a road. The road was shaped like the back (Mune) of the Bokken, or wooden practice sword. Close to…

The cutting away of these illusions and the blossoming of the students’ ultimate abilities are the responsibility of the student and teacher together. If you’ve spent an extended time practicing the martial ways, you know that there are many types of…

It might seem like overthinking to make a blog post about distributing advertising flyers. Maybe so, but while I was posting a few on bulletin boards around town in preparation for our new home dojang's grand opening, I noticed that in…

Although a quick web search shows that the most common translation of Ji Do Kwan is "Way of Wisdom" or "School of Wisdom," when I was a new student, my teachers often referred to an alternate translation: "The Right Way."…

The dojang is a formal training environment with special traditions that are unfamiliar to most new students. Many of these rules and customs will eventually become clear through osmosis: as new students watch more experienced practitioners, they understand what is expected in our…

The practice of the Martial Ways is really, in its most basic sense, a search for hardship. One of my teachers, Yoshioka Sadao Sensei, used to tell us that the most important concept in our practice should be “Kokoro wo…

Instructors and students alike, we are all in this together. For most of the time since RVTKD was founded in 1997, we conducted evaluations in the same way. About a week after each rank test, we'd assemble the school, bow in, and…

For most of their history, the martial arts have existed as oral traditions. Only a few well-known texts predate the twentieth century. Over the past hundred years, as printed martial arts material has become more common, most of the publications…

Our school's primary focus is evening Tae Kwon Do classes for adults in Northampton and Florence, Massachusetts. We also offer a Saturday morning class and periodic RAD women's self defense classes at our home dojang in Florence.